Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
My thesis is coming along. The modular framework is solid. The scalability model passes every test I’ve run. The security integration section, the one he gave me advice on, is the strongest part of the paper, and I hate that. I hate that the best part of my work carries his fingerprints, but I won’t cut it because it’s good, and I won’t sabotage good work to spite a man who isn’t worth the sabotage.
He’s worth it. He told me he wasn’t and I told him he was and I meant it. I still mean it. That’s the worst part.
Dr. Malvar reads my latest draft and tells me it’s exceptional. She doesn’t mention the formal review or the F that appeared on my record or the department meeting where Agnes Cuthbert wrapped a knife in policy language and aimed it at my throat. She just tells me the work is good and asks if I need anything, and I say no, and she nods, and I walk out of her office and my hands are still.
SUNDAY. 1:15 PM.
“Baby girl.” Mama’s voice, warm and flat and three thousand miles too far away. “How’s my city mouse?”
“Good, Mama. How’s Daddy’s hip?”
“Oh, he’s walking with character again. Went out to check the calves this morning and came back pretending he wasn’t wincing. I told him the calves don’t need checking at five AM and he said the calves disagree.”
I almost smile. The muscles try. They get halfway and stop, like a car that turns over but won’t catch.
“And you, sweetheart? You eating?”
“David feeds me.”
“That boy’s a saint. You tell him Martha says he’s got a standing invitation for pot roast if he ever makes it to Nebraska.”
“I’ll tell him.”
A pause. The kettle. The creak of Daddy’s chair. The specific, particular silence of a mother listening to the things her daughter isn’t saying.
“Elsa, honey.” Softer now. “You sound thin again.”
“I’m fine, Mama. Just busy with the thesis.”
The lie comes out smooth. Practiced. I’ve been lying to Martha Lively for weeks now, and each time the skill of it horrifies me a little less, and that’s how I know I’m losing something. Not weight, not sleep, not grades, but some essential Elsa-ness, some honesty that used to live in my voice like a second pulse, and it’s going quiet.
“You’d tell me.” Not a question this time. A statement. Martha Lively, who can read her daughter through a phone line the way a farmer reads a sky, isn’t asking. She’s holding up a mirror and waiting for me to look.
“I will, I promise.”
I hang up. I sit on my bed. The phone is warm in my hand. My fingers are wrapped around it, perfectly still, no circle on the case, no absent tracing of the edge.
Iowa watches me from the ceiling. It has no opinion.
THURSDAY. THIRD ROW.
He enters at two minutes past the hour. He’s wearing the navy suit, the one I catalogued during the first semester as formal, no rolled sleeves, closed. His hair is perfect. His posture is the posture of a man who hasn’t lost a single minute of sleep, who hasn’t hit his desk with his fist, who hasn’t written a note in Italian that his control couldn’t contain.
He looks the same.
I hate that he looks the same.
The lecture is on vulnerability scanning. How to search a system for weaknesses before an attacker does. His voice moves through the hall with its usual authority, low, accented, pulling two hundred students into attention, and I write every word and I don’t look up and my hands don’t move except to write.
Thirty minutes in, David’s pen stops.
I feel it more than see it—the cessation of motion beside me, David’s constant idle scribbling going quiet. I glance sideways. He’s not writing. He’s looking at me. Then at the podium. Then back at me.
He doesn’t say anything. David, who always has something to say, who fills silence with easy warmth and protein bars and batting averages, is quiet. He’s looking at my hands.
My hands are still. No circles.
After class, he falls into step beside me. Doesn’t speak for a full block, and it’s unusual enough that I notice.
“Lively.”
“Burnes.”
“You stopped doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The circle thing. With your finger.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking straight ahead, hands in his jacket pockets, cap pulled low. “You used to do it all the time. On your notebook, your coffee cup, your bag. You did it constantly. And now you don’t.”
My hand is at my side. My fingers are loose. They don’t reach for my strap or my wrist or any of the surfaces where my circles used to live.
“I didn’t know you noticed that.”
“I notice stuff about you, Elsa.” No edge. No agenda. Just the plain fact of a friend who has been paying attention. “You stopped about two weeks ago. Right around the time you stopped eating lunch unless I physically bring you food and started looking at me like you’re hearing me from underwater.”